A financial institution (e.g., a large bank) offers various financial services to clients. These services include: merger and acquisition (i.e., doing financial restructuring such as helping clients buy companies, merge with companies, and sell or spin off divisions into new companies), equity capital market (i.e., issuing equity such as Initial Public Offering (IPOs), Follow-ons, and private placements into the capital markets), debt capital market (i.e., issuing varying types of debt such as bonds, loans, and leveraged finance into the capital market, and global credit risk management (i.e., managing the credit risk of a bank with respect to outstanding credit (loans leveraged) to its clients). These services are called deals.
During the whole lifecycle of a deal, it will go through the following steps: deal setup, conflicts approval, analyzing, making a deal including pitching, winning, executing and closing mandates, expense tracking, and deal closure.
Current technology doesn't offer an unified and integrated way for a whole deal lifecycle. For example, in an acquisition deal, acquisition and raising capital are separate processes instead of one, which is inefficient. In addition, different information for a deal is controlled by different deal-related departments, which results in multiple and repetitive work during a deal process. Furthermore, no mechanism exists, which integrates all deals and processes into one platform on which users can access different classes of secured financial information in real-time by means of an multi-layer user interface with high navigation ability. Hence, there is a need to establish such a system for integrating the whole lifecycle of deals.